Book Review: The Practice of Programming

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I recently found, The Practice of Programming (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series), sitting on the shelf at my local library.  I am generally skeptical when it comes to programming books, and particularly those from different decades, but I trusted the name "Brian Kernighan" so I checked the book out.

And I am so glad that I did.  From the first chapter that discussed style, I wanted to read more.  And the only reason to ever stop reading was to pull out a computer and put these things into practice.  I didn't even mind that it wasn't until chapter 7 that performance was discussed.  Still, I will readily acknowledge that I disagree with some of statements in the book.  Furthermore, there are some parts of the text that are clearly dated, like discussing current C / C++ standards.

I'd like to conclude with a brief code snippet from the work.  This code is part of a serializer / deserializer.  Such routines are always a pain to write and particularly if you have many different classes / structs that need them.  Thus the authors suggest using vargs and writing a single routine that can handle this for you.  Here is the unpack (i.e., deserialize) routine:

/* unpack: unpack packed items from buf, return length */
int unpack(uchar *buf, char *fmt, ...)
{
    va_list args;
    char *p;
    uchar *bp, *pc;
    ushort *ps;
    ulong *pl;

    bp = buf;
    va_start(args, fmt);
    for (p = fmt; *p != '\0'; p++) {
        switch (*p) {
        case 'c': /* char */
            pc = va_arg(args, uchar*);
            *pc = *bp++;
            break;
         case 's': /* short */
             ps = va_arg(args, ushort*);
             *ps = *bp++ << 8;
             *ps |= *bp++;
             break;
         case 'l': /* long */
             pl = va_arg(args, ulong*);
             *pl = *bp++ << 24;
             *pl |= *bp++ << 16;
             *pl |= *bp++ << 8;
             *pl |= *bp++;
         default: /* illegal type character */
             va_end(args);
             return -1;
         }
     }
     va_end(args);
     return bp - buf;
}

So now we have a little language for describing the format of the data in the buffer.  We invoke unpack with a string like "cscl" and pointers to store the char, short, char and long.  Hah!  That's it.  Anytime we add new types, we just to call the pack / unpack.

Does it matter that the variables are only sequences like "pl" or "bp"?  No.  Variable names should be meaningful and consistent.  "i" can be fine for a loop iterator.

We have given up some performance (*gasp*), but gained in the other parts that matter like readability and maintainability.  I plan on using this in my current research (but only the unpack, as my serializers are already highly optimized).  All in all, I approve of this book and may even someday require it as a textbook for students.